£7.99
This is a short, limited edition ebook, with all proceeds being divided between the Communication Workers Union’s Humanitarian Fund for Ukraine, and Artists at Risk’s Ukraine appeal.
Today, during Russia’s imperialist war on Ukraine, everyone is talking about this large, beautiful and multicultural country, but, when doing so, they’re often repeating some poorly understood cliches and myths.
Ukrainian Postcards, written firmly from the political left, draws on the author’s writings on the modern architecture of various Ukrainian cities, written between 2010 and 2020, to build up a picture of a country that could one day be a model of how to live with a difficult past and a multicultural present — but which has been consistently undermined by politicians who use it as a cashbox and, above all, a neighbour who uses it as punchbag.
Above all, at a time when Ukraine’s architectural heritage is literally under threat — shelled and bombed by the Russian air force, day-in-day-out — it outlines just how valuable and special this country’s buildings are, and how much we stand to lose with their destruction.
Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for, among others, the Architectural Review, the Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin, the London Review of Books and New Humanist. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016) and The Chaplin Machine (Pluto, 2016), the last of which is based on a PhD thesis accepted by Birkbeck College in 2011. A book on European cities, Trans-Europe Express, will be published in 2018.